I felt cruel, not at all pleased by my ability to disappoint her. I even felt dreadful about defaming the figment and found myself hoping his practice wouldn’t suffer.
“Bernard.” C.K. rolled the syllables around, giving them a peculiar Scottish-Southern burr, as if the ghosts of distant Mackenzies had materialized to disparage Berrrnarrrd.
“Forget him. He doesn’t exist.” I came back into the living room with the carafe of coffee and refilled our cups.
“Boy, when you’re finished with somebody, you’re really finished, aren’t you?” Mackenzie eyed me warily. “I’ll bear that in mind. And you’re pretty high and mighty about my entertaining a houseguest while you’re messing with a—what was his drug of choice? Or is your contempt reserved for former
flames,
as you put it, and current druggies don’t count?”
“He’s a
joke!
He’s nothing!”
“You are one harsh woman. The man has problems, but—”
“I don’t want to talk about him.” Bernard wasn’t the joke—I was, to have been involved in such a pathetic game.
“Okay,” Mackenzie said. “Then let’s talk some about why you keep acting like Doris Day in a bad movie, and a worse snit.”
I shrugged and nodded at the same time, an if-you-insist grudged agreement. Mackenzie put down his cup and stood up. Maybe because of his slouch, I am always surprised by his height, especially when I am being loomed over and interrogated.
“You could be nicer to the woman,” he said. “I know she’s dull, but her father and my mother are cousins, and the family said she needed this break, so what could I do?”
“You think she’s dull?”
He looked surprised. “What? Yes. Of course. Don’t you?”
I felt an almost giddy relief. “I thought you and she—”
He cruised the room again, running his hand over the mantel, the windowsill, the back of the suede chair. Mackenzie’s as good as a feather duster on his fidgety strolls. “I assumed you’d understand. You work with adolescents. I was nineteen and she was seventeen and the attraction wasn’t intellectual. It wasn’t particularly physical, either, but it was incredibly, intensely,
available.
At that age, that seemed enough. For a few months. Then, even back then, it wasn’t. Unfortunately, our parents stayed related, so we’ve seen each other through the years at Christmas and anniversaries and her wedding. That’s all.”
He sat down on the sofa near me and took one of my hands. “I
don’t much care for knee-jerk assumptions,” he said softly. “Particularly from you. Like you weren’t seeing me, just generic male evil.” His free hand approached my bruised forehead, stroking the air near it, as if he could magically heal me.
“Bernard was literally a joke Beth made up, but my mother took it seriously. I had to bump him off.”
“Tonight, after you ran away,” Mackenzie murmured, “I decided that you didn’t believe men and women could be friends.”
“This hasn’t been the best week for that kind of belief,” I whispered. “It’s stupid, I know, but the final straw was when she admitted she called you Snuggles.”
“What?” He looked as if he expected to find me drooling and cross-eyed. “Who said that? Snuggles? Me?
Me?
”
He laughed out loud and shook his head so vigorously his gray-brown curls danced. “Where’d you ever get that idea?”
So there were some plots the great detective did not even suspect. I felt almost sorry for Jinx. “I got the idea from somebody who only pretends she believes men and women can be friends,” I said.
He isn’t dumb, not even after four days with Jinx. “She’s leavin’ tomorrow,” he said.
“I thought not until Sunday.”
“Changed her mind after dinner. Remembered something. I don’t know why, all of a sudden like that, but I admit I didn’t try to talk her out of it.”
I knew why. Because she didn’t know his name, either, and she’d never called him Snuggles and because he left her to find me and because she was dull, but not stupid. What she remembered was that the pickings would be better elsewhere.
“Her flight’s at five,” he said. “Maybe we could have dinner—real food, too—after I drop her off?”
“Pick me up at school? I’ll be selling junk.”
“So,” he said, his voice low and a little husky. “Do you believe men and women can be friends?”
I was willing to be convinced.
Let me say that there is nothing more comforting than a bodyguard, especially one who takes a keen and extremely personal interest in the body he’s guarding.
Mackenzie left at dawn, by which time I wasn’t shaky, terrified, or angry anymore.
Not even when I realized I hadn’t marked a paper or checked a lesson plan since a few lifetimes ago, and that before and since Wynn Teller’s murder I’d done nothing but make things worse. Not even when I put on my coat, and enough feathers for a small throw pillow escaped and I had to go to work with a Band-Aid over the rip. Not even when I opened the door to a heavy grayness that hissed
snow.
Not even when I realized my car was still on the curb and decorated with a big, fat parking ticket on its windshield. Not even when I acknowledged that I still had no idea who had tried to murder me yesterday.
Well, maybe a little when I thought about that.
Twenty
I INTERCEPTED A NOTE THAT ANNOUNCED
MISS PEPPER HAS
A HICKEY ON HER forehead!
I tried to imagine the passionate scene that would result in a bruise in that locale, but the only kind I could think of was a Wynn Teller kind of passion that left a woman as disfigured and discolored as Lydia had been. Which more or less ended the post-Snuggles euphoria.
I wanted to make sure the note writer understood that bruises weren’t signs of love, but she was anonymous, her sex known only because teensy open circles dotting i’s are not yet an androgynous affectation.
The morning plodded ahead normally, as if all was right with the world.
Maybe it was, or as all right as things can be in a not all right universe. The morning
Inquirer
chortled WIFE CHARGED IN TLC MURDER with salacious, unhesitant delight. Everything was settled to everybody else’s satisfaction, justice meted out.
But I wasn’t satisfied about who shot me or why. I wasn’t satisfied about why Lydia—the goodie—lied. I wasn’t satisfied about Adam and Eve and Fay. Or Neil.
Everybody was crazy except me.
But that’s exactly what crazy people thought, wasn’t it?
Except if I was aware of the manner in which crazy people thought, I wasn’t crazy, was I?
I grumped my way down the stairs, past the office, toward the faculty lounge. “Yo!” Edie Friedman said. “News update.” She gestured back toward the office. “I eavesdropped. Angela’s
still
in labor. She’s setting the all-Jefferson varsity hard labor record.” Her expression turned wistfully hopeful and I tensed. “Did you see Neil’s sub?” she asked. “Kind of cute and literary, with the beard and the glasses.”
We were nearly in the lounge when I realized what she’d said. “Jefferson?” I asked. “Jefferson Hospital? Are you sure?”
She nodded and opened the lounge door.
“Not Lankenau?”
“Jefferson. The humongous brick place where they take sick people and ladies having babies? Want me to walk you down there? Honestly, Mandy!”
I replayed yesterday afternoon as best I could. The odd visit, the phone call from a strange woman, the offer to take my car—but I had made the offer, hadn’t I?
I had thought the person in the car on my street left me alone because Neil was there, but perhaps Neil had been there because of the person in the car. As in a setup. A cohort with a gray car. Why else take me miles away?
Because the right hospital was in the city, crowded, obvious. The wrong hospital was in the green, rolling suburbs, on a quiet campus with outdoor parking. The better to shoot somebody and get away.
I shuddered. It was also possible that Neil could have gone out another exit from the hospital, could have raced to that car, waiting for him with his cohort.
I’d fallen into a lethal farce, one with real guns. And when I noticed what was going on around me in the teachers’ lounge, the farcical feeling persisted.
Déjà vu all over again. Only today it wasn’t schnecken, but turkey and lettuce on pita with a side of tomato. “I bought two on purpose,” the biology teacher said. “I didn’t want to have to go out and buy anything today. What is this, some kind of revenge because you thought I snatched your mother’s cookies?”
“I didn’t take your sandwich!”
This was too boring for an encore.
“My cup has been moved again,” Potter Standish—
Doctor
Potter Standish—pronounced. There is always a natural hush after his inane edicts, because his uninflected tone mimics a newscaster with major late-breaking news.
“This is no longer a trivial matter,” he intoned.
Pompous Potter, but all the same, the disappearing acts were getting creepy. Formerly amicable coworkers suspiciously eyed each other and held on to their food stocks like peasants in a famine.
“Jean Valjean’s back to his tricks,” I said. “Only now he’s stealing the sandwich filling, too.” Only Charlie Pickles, fellow English teacher, snickered, and Charlie Pickles was a pedantic oaf.
“Where is this John fellow?” Potter demanded.
“In
Les Miserables,
” Charlie said from over in the corner. “He’s the poor sap sentenced to nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread.”
“Is he out yet?” Potter asked.
“It’s
fiction
,” I said.
“No wonder.” Potter turned back to study the coffee cup arrangement. “Fiction,” he said with as much contempt as a monotone can muster.
The lounge felt overheated, overcrowded, and overexcited. Everyone looked on the verge of screaming “
J’accuse!
” I decided to do something useful with my lunch hour. There was a whiz of a seamstress a few blocks up, and perhaps she could perform first aid on my coat. A flesh-toned Band-Aid was not very subtle or secure on a navy sleeve.
Without its downy contents, the injured sleeve was scant protection from the cold, but the rest of me felt decently insulated, and there was nothing like a walk to encourage thinking.
I checked for the gray car,
but to tell the truth, I was no longer positive of its color. There seemed a lot of near-possibilities: blue-silver, or taupe, or beige. I wondered if Edie knew what color car Neil drove. I wished I paid more attention to those things.
The square’s Formerly Taller Women were meeting elsewhere this noon, but there was a full contingent of homeless souls waiting on benches until shelters opened. I can never resist a moment’s worry that they were once English teachers in private schools with no tenure or pension plan.
I was nearly across the square when I saw her. Her pretty royal-blue coat made her stand out because it didn’t fit the general attire or the bruised and defeated rest of her. “You’re out, then,” I gasped.
Lydia Teller looked chronically frightened.
“What are you doing here?” I sat down on the empty portion of her bench.
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“For…ummm…you. To thank you. For your kindness. I forgot how schools are, though. All the people. I decided to wait until afterward.”
“That’s hours from now. You can’t sit out here all that time, and anyway, there’s no need to thank me.” No reason, either, if we were honest.
“I was just going, actually. To have coffee somewhere and wait,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. Here, she blended in with the lost people. In a coffee shop, her mustard and mauve and gray-green bruises would attract attention. The poor cameo face had a Richard Nixon five o’clock shadow of bruises, not quite as livid as they’d been, but still sufficiently horrifying.
I touched her hand, hoping to comfort her. “Are you upset about going back to that house? Do you want to stay with me awhile?”
She shook her head, her lips tight.
“Then is there some other way I can help you?” I asked.
She shook her head again. “You’ve already done too much.”
I didn’t dare ask what that meant. Instead, I offered to hail a cab for her.
“Oh, no, I drove. I’m parked right there.” She waved without looking. There were three vehicles at the curb, a tangerine Trans-Am, a white and green van with MICKY’S DRY CLEANERS stenciled on it, and a sedan the color of fog.
I changed the subject even though she didn’t know it. “Was it very terrible with the police?” I asked while my eyes reverted to the narc car.
“It would have been without your brother-in-law. If he and his colleague hadn’t taken care of everything so well, I would have had to stay there all night.”
“And you didn’t?” I took a deep breath of the hostile air and tried to make my question sound innocuous. Girl talk. “And how quickly did that brother-in-law of mine get you released?”
Her eyes wandered vaguely, pausing only when they looked up at the bare branches arching over us. “I’m not sure. It was almost dark. When would that be?”
Afternoon is when that would be in darkest February. Early enough to toddle down to my street then trail me out to the suburbs and avenge herself on the woman who had ruined everything for her.
I wondered if I saw madness along with bruises on her battered face. I also wondered whether there was an antique, but lethal, weapon in the commodious purse on her lap. She clutched its handle with both hands, like a woman waiting for a bus.
Perhaps it was time to stop protecting her and begin protecting myself. Push her a little, test her. “I saw the young man who says he’s Adam Teller, Wynn’s son. Right here, actually. And his sister.”
“Wholeperson,” Lydia muttered.
“They said they were at your house the night Wynn…Wednesday night.”
Lydia stared at me blankly.
“They said you were upset, too.”
“How couldn’t I be?” she said, surprising me. “They act like they’re his only children—if they’re his children at all!”
“I thought you were upstairs the whole time,” I said quietly.
“After that. After them, I ran upstairs. They put Wynn in a fury. He hurt me. I ran upstairs.”